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virginiabruce's comments:
on Health Care Changes
Health is not something you buy, it's something you do.
The medicalization of health, while useful in the acute sense, has not solved the problem of personal responsibility for healthy choices and lifestyle.
Improving mental health goes hand in hand with this, since mentally healthy people want to feel well.
posted 2 years, 1 month ago
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on Behind the Scenes: Medicine
Health is not something you buy, it's something you do. Doctors and patients need to work together to achieve and maintain health.
As a person who has lived the last 10 years without health insurance, I've been paying a lot more attention to my diet, activity and taking a few supplements. I'm in my mid-60s and I'm in pretty good shape...
posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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on Egypt Revolts
Everyone is saying that the movement is leaderless. This makes me wonder if this is something that Mubarak has caused by eliminating possible strong leaders in labor and other groups.
posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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on The Slow Path to Adulthood
Maybe some of the push to leave the family came from the nation's "need" to settle the frontier. The frontier is gone now and we are overpopulated, so stronger family connections and staying in place makes more sense.
posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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on Election 2010: The Morning After
and boy is your website screwed up -- it took me about ten minutes to get this comment entered.
posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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on Election 2010: The Morning After
Our totally grassroots campaign for Greg Malinowski for Washington County Commissioner was successful and we're feeling good about that "hopey changey thing" in District 2.
Our organic farmer won against a guy who sells strip mines for a living -- although we will continue with the balance of power in "oregon's economic engine" staying with the "business as usual" folks.
posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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on Covering Kyron
I have about 1400 people on my Cedar Mill News email list. I passed along info about the effort the Skyline Grange was making to assist the searchers, knowing that some of my readers would want to help.
Within a couple of hours, I was called by a TV reporter wanting to know if I could help them get into the Grange Hall, even though the Grange folks had posted signs banning the press.
This predatory press behavior -- get something to fill the airwaves -- helps raise everyone's fear level.
A local effort to get more kids walking to school is up against this perceived "stranger danger." I contend that life is no more dangerous than it ever was, it's just that we hear so much about every little thing that happens.
Fearful people are more easily led. Don't trade your freedom for safety.
posted 2 years, 10 months ago
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on Rebirth of Local Journalism
I publish a "hyperlocal" monthly -- The Cedar MIll News. It started 7 years ago as a newsletter for our business association, but quickly turned into a neighborhood paper. http://cedarmill.org/news
I have experienced a real surge in ad revenue in the last year - just as the Oregonian has cut back.
While I rarely get "breaking news" I do cover local issues in more depth than my readers can get anywhere else -- politics, governance, development etc. My goal has been to connect people to the community so that they invest themselves, their families, and their dollars in Cedar Mill.
It started out as a side activity, but is now my biggest source of income. We have over 1200 online readers, and 600 printed copies (printing donated by Copytronix) and it's available both as a PDF and as separate web pages.
Let me know if you want me to call in and comment...
posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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on Northwest Passages: Michael & Matthew Dickman
I'm curious about the factors in their upbringing and education that led these brothers into poetry. It doesn't seem that there's much room for it in modern life.
posted 3 years, 10 months ago
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on Healthy Choices
I'm surprised not to be hearing about Michael Pollan's work in this show. His 2 books, Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food, offer a lot of insight. He lays a lot of the obesity epidemic at the door of processed food - stuffing extra calories into food as a result of the overproduction of corn, brought in by Earl Butz and the effot to make food cheap.
In Defense of Food recommends this simple formula: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." He says that anything with a "healthy" claim on a package is probably not good for you.
posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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on Within Bounds
Growth is fundamental to traditional capitalism. It is also completely unsustainable. The idea that we must grow to progress is based on 18th century ideas of unlimited frontiers and "manifest destiny" that anything "primitive" must be civilized.
We know now that these ideas are based on false assumptions. Ever since we saw that blue ball floating in space, we have been struggling with the reality of our finite planet.
Time to explore new ways to think about economy and progress. Ever higher profits must be at the expense of the environment and future generations, at least until we begin to colonize Mars!
posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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on Oregon: The Next 150 Years
Growth is fundamental to traditional capitalism, but it is not sustainable. We need to consider a steady-state economy that will encourage improvement, not just expansion.
Out here in Washington County, we have a couple of areas that were brought into the UGB in 2002 but haven't been developed because of infrastructure limitations.
Taxpayers don't want to subsidize the profits of developers, and governments haven't figured out an alternative.
posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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on Oregon: The Next 150 Years
We will have a local food system that allows the average person to get locally grown food throughout the year, not just in the summer when farmers' markets are open.
This will be accomplished by converting fields of grass seed and christmas trees into food farms, and by renovating our food-processing plants that were closed after we started relying on globally-sourced food.
posted 4 years, 3 months ago
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on The Big Look
Two questions:
Should water quality and a sustainable environment be criteria for selecting future land uses?
Should increasing local food production be a priority? It seems to me that the globalization of our food supply is increasingly a bad idea for so many reasons...
posted 4 years, 9 months ago
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on What's Slipping Through the Cracks?
And it's kind of boring to scroll past all the old stuff just to see what the latest posts are...
My 2οΎ’
posted 4 years, 11 months ago
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on What's Slipping Through the Cracks?
We wrote a series of articles in the Cedar Mill News examining the history of how so much of Washington County became urbanized without cities, see
http://cedarmill.org/news/archive/UrbanNeeds.html
for background info on the situation.
This is a complicated situation, but it's very important for people to understand the issues. I could recommend several people to include in the conversation.
posted 4 years, 11 months ago
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on One Billion Served?
One billion American-style consumers is a terrifying thought. Even shipping massive quantities of stuff across the ocean spews carbon into the atmosphere.
I know it's good for business, but it's not good for our planet or our grandchildren.
posted 5 years, 1 month ago
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on The State of the Economy
Can economists turn their attention to figuring out new economic principles based on sustainable practices rather that the outmoded model of continual growth?
posted 5 years, 3 months ago
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